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Tag:mortalityClear
themarginalian.org
Death and How to Be More Alive: Carl Jung on Immortality and the Rebirth of Middle Age

From the middle of life onward, only he remains vitally alive who is ready to die with life. For in the secret hour of life's midday the parabola is reversed, death is born. The second half of life does not signify ascent, unfolding, increase, exuberance, but death, since the end is its goal. The negation of life's fulfillment is synonymous with the refusal to accept its ending. Both mean not wanting to live, and not wanting to live is identical with not wanting to die.

— Carl Jung
1d ago

The mass of men worry themselves into nameless graves, while here and there a great unselfish soul forgets himself into immortality.

1d ago

We are at war with Nature; whichever side wins, we lose.

1w ago
longreads.com
A Dying Art

With its disappearance, we stand to lose a whole way of memorializing our dead: one that might be pricey, unnecessary, and even a little absurd, but only out of commitment to the notion that an occasion as final as death is worthy of pomp and circumstance.

1w ago

It is not length of life, but depth of life. Cut these questionings short, and accept the universe as it is, and work in it rather than to understand it.

1w ago

We live, as we dream—alone; and what makes it maddening is that we know it, and yet cannot help ourselves from dreaming that some other solitude will someday reach across and be company to our own.

1w ago
themarginalian.org
Borges on How to Conquer Time

The vociferous catastrophes of a general order — fires, wars, epidemics — are one single pain, illusorily multiplied in many mirrors.

2w ago
themarginalian.org
How to Bear Your Sorrows: Nick Cave on Integrating the Darkness of Loss with the Bright Ongoingness of Life

I am not saying this just to offer comfort to those who have lost someone, as if to say that in time everything will be all right, because even though it will be, it won't be. Rather, I am acknowledging that although this day marks the 11th anniversary of the worst day of our lives, it is also a beautiful day, with the sun shining, a child playing, a man enjoying a cigarette, a world quietly waking and moving forward.

2w ago
themarginalian.org
Do Not Spare Yourself

To try to save ourselves from the despair by which we contour hope, to spare ourselves the fertile doubt and the gasps of self-surprise by which we discover who we really are, is to live a safe distance from alive.

3w ago

It is not the same to talk of bulls from behind the barriers as to be in the bullring. I have been in the bullring, and I know that fear is not in the legs but in the soul.

3w ago

It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners — yet what is health but the name we give to our present ignorance of what ails us?

3w ago

The universe is not cruel, nor is it kind — it is simply what it is, and we are the creatures who discovered sorrow by learning to want what it cannot give us.

4w ago
themarginalian.org
Hermann Hesse on Solitude, the Value of Hardship, the Courage to Be Yourself, and How to Find Your Destiny

When destiny comes to a man from outside, it lays him low, just as an arrow lays a deer low. When destiny comes to a man from within, from his innermost being, it makes him strong, it makes him into a god… All sorrow, poison, and death are alien, imposed destiny. But every true act, everything that is good and joyful and fruitful on earth, is lived destiny, destiny that has become self.

4w ago

The demand of the loveless and the self-imprisoned that they should be allowed to age and die in the same prison is mocked by nature, which proceeds by ceaseless mutation and transformation.

4w ago
notboring.co
America's Next 250

Two hundred and fifty years seems like a long time, but it's just three peoples' lifetimes at current averages. It would have been six lifetimes back then, except the average American's life expectancy has doubled over the past 250 years.

4w ago

The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.

4w ago

We are compelled to drive onward; we cannot turn back. There is a fire in men that does not let them rest. And so they must go on and on, until they find something real — or perish in the attempt.

4w ago

It is not length of life, but depth of life. The way to make life worth living is not to guard the hours, but to fill them — not to preserve the days, but to use them.

4w ago

The really frightening thing about middle age is the knowledge that you'll grow out of it.

1mo ago
themarginalian.org
Why You

Against this utter choicelessness in the variables we each drew from the cosmic lottery — our pigments, our neurotransmitters, our outpost in space and in time — it becomes downright absurd to grow attached to the story and its byproducts: opinions, identities, absolutisms. It is a salutary thought experiment to go through a single day imagining any one of those variables having fallen one one-thousandth of a degree elsewhere on the plane of possibility — suddenly, the person going through your day is not you.

1mo ago

We are always getting ready to live, but never living. The only thing grief has taught me is to know how shallow it is.

1mo ago
themarginalian.org
Kurt Vonnegut’s Life-Advice to His Children

You're learning now that you do not inhabit a solid, reliable, social structure — that the older you get people around you are worried, moody, goofy human beings who themselves were little kids only a few days ago. When things go well for days on end, it is an hilarious accident. Those years weren't lost. They simply weren't the way I'd planned them.

1mo ago
themarginalian.org
Yes to Life, in Spite of Everything: Viktor Frankl’s Lost Lectures on Moving Beyond Optimism and Pessimism to Find the Deepest Source of Meaning

Everything had fallen away from him during those years: money, power, fame; nothing was certain for him anymore: not life, not health, not happiness; all had been called into question for him: vanity, ambition, relationships. Everything was reduced to bare existence. Burnt through with pain, everything that was not essential was melted down — the human being reduced to what he was in the last analysis: either a member of the masses, therefore no one real, so really no one — the anonymous one, a nameless thing (!), that "he" had now become, just a prisoner number; or else he melted right down to his essential self.

1mo ago

The mark of the historic is that the present moment always will have been. What we do now is irrevocable—it joins the permanent record of what has occurred, and in that sense the past is the only thing that cannot be taken from us.

1mo ago

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats.

1mo ago
themarginalian.org
How to Live Fully: The Samurai Guide to Dying Every Day

There is surely nothing other than the single purpose of the present moment. A person's whole life is a succession of moment after moment. If one fully understands the present moment, there will be nothing else to do, and nothing else to pursue.

1mo ago

We are not permitted to choose the frame of our destiny. But what we put into it is ours.

1mo ago

It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.

1mo ago

We live, as we dream — alone. While the dream disappears, the life continues painfully.

1mo ago
longreads.com
The Feeding

She wanted to forget having been sick, while I was in the next room, sobbing like she was already gone.

1mo ago

We shall not pretend that life is all beauty; we shall, as tragic poets always do, start with evil, and only then show that the noblest response to evil is not flight from it but the courage to face it.

1mo ago

The universe is not hostile, nor yet is it friendly. It is simply indifferent. To the large mind of the astronomer it is neither cruel nor kind, but only stupendous — and that is almost worse than cruelty.

1mo ago
themarginalian.org
Ursula K. Le Guin on the Meaning of Life

What we are, who we are, and where we are going, I do not know, nor do I believe anybody who says he knows, except, possibly, Beethoven, in the last movement of the last symphony. All I know is that we are here, and that we are aware of the fact, and that it behooves us to be aware — to pay heed. For we are not objects.

1mo ago
themarginalian.org
How to Keep Life from Becoming a Parody of Itself: Simone de Beauvoir on the Art of Growing Older

There is only one solution if old age is not to be an absurd parody of our former life, and that is to go on pursuing ends that give our existence a meaning — devotion to individuals, to groups or to causes, social, political, intellectual or creative work… In old age we should wish still to have passions strong enough to prevent us turning in on ourselves. One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation, compassion.

1mo ago

We are always getting ready to live, but never living. The object of living is life itself, and yet we continually sacrifice it to something beyond.

1mo ago

We are in the habit of imagining our lives to be linear, a long march from birth to death. In fact, they are composed of thousands of days, each one a world in itself.

1mo ago
themarginalian.org
The Only Three Distinctions Between People

Instead of rich and poor, high and low, they are to be classed, — First, by their sorrows... Secondly, all who have the same maladies... Thirdly, all who are guilty of the same sins, whether the world knows them or not; whether they languish in prison, looking forward to the gallows, or walk honored among men, they also form a class. Then proceed to generalize and classify the whole world together, as none can claim utter exemption from either sorrow, sin, or disease; and if they could, yet Death, like a great parent, comes and sweeps all through one darksome portal, — all his children.

2mo ago

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.

2mo ago

The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition.

2mo ago

We live on the surface of a star, and we are made of the dust of stars. The atoms in our bodies were forged in the hearts of dying stars billions of years ago.

2mo ago
longreads.com
Roadside Attraction

But as I sit in my house, so quiet I can hear the blood in my body, the sunset painting the sky a deep, pink hue, I can only think that all of these men are gone and I am still here. I continue, continue, and continue, to still be here. It seems I am in wait, Jodie Foster on the side of the road, letting the world, and the world beyond the world, whisper into my ears.

2mo ago

We are always dying. From the moment we are born, we begin the process of dying. We do not know how long we shall live—how many years or months or days.

2mo ago

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